I Will Come for You Read Free Page A

old and watched the tales of murder unfold, first in the living room of his own home, and then on television. Two boys, aged ten and eleven, found on the bluffs above Deep Bay. Graham saw the pictures after he became a cop. The sweet horror of them makes a full night’s sleep a dream and taunts the starts and ends of each day. Graham knows his brother was the first victim because the other boy, Steven Forrester, reached out and laid his hand on top of Lance’s. Then he, too, died.
    Everything here at the Iverson scene matches the other victims, everything except the size seven footprint found in Shelley Iverson’s blood and a single strand of dark hair retrieved from her body. Someone stood beside her while she died; knelt in her blood when it was still fresh, in a position that suggests was a compassionate vigil. That doesn’t match the cold and calculated killer known to Vancouver Island for more than fifteen years as the King’s Ferry Killer.
    Forensics used the impressions in the woman’s blood to come up with an approximate weight and height of the person. It could have been a kid, or a small woman. Iverson was found by her father, a man who weighed as much as, if not more, than Graham. The doors and the windows were locked, with no sign of tampering. He knows they’ll find no fingerprints of interest.  The DNA evidence they recover will belong to the victim, her family or known visitors. Probably this brown hair, too. 
    But Graham will approach Saul Doss again anyway. The man is somewhat of a local legend in psychological circles, having achieved new levels of success in reclaiming the lives and the minds of many thought lost to mental illness. The department consulted Doss on a number of occasions regarding the King’s Ferry Killer over the years. Graham spoke to him and made note of their conversations in the case file. Doss described a killer of cold thought and precise action.  When asked who he should be looking for, Doss replied, “A depleted soul. Evil dressed in human form.”
    Well, welcome to the world of serial killers.              
    Graham pressed for a more concrete marker from Doss, something more tangible that would help him pick the killer out of a crowd of deviants, but the man was of little help. And there was something about him, maybe it was the way the man hesitated before answering Graham’s questions that he felt, on an instinctual level, was more than careful thought. Graham suspect ed Doss of withholding information. When challenged, Doss rose in denial and in the end, Doss’ observations matched the psychological profile developed by the experts at the RCMP. But the man’s behavior continued to tease Graham’s suspicion, even after checking Doss’ whereabouts at the time of the murders and coming up with a hard alibi for each.
    The original profile predicted white male, aged twenty-two to forty-seven at the first strike. It gave a probable description of the killer’s mind and even used some of the same vocabulary Doss used--cold and calculated, even the smallest detail considered and accomplished.
    Compassion, or any emotion like it, does not fit this crime.
    Graham doesn’t believe the KFK took a partner, but he has to investigate the possibility anyway, because someone knelt beside Shelley Iverson as she died. 
    Th eir ninth victim in nearly sixteen years.
    Graha m’s brother and a friend in 1997. Then seven years later, a single victim, a fifty-two year old woman visiting the island during the summer tourist season. Another pair, man and woman, forty-two and twenty, known to be having an affair, were killed in December 2006. Then two women, co-workers aged nineteen and twenty-two, murdered three days apart in 2008.  In 2009, a high school senior, Simon Tuney, was murdered outside his home. Now Shelley Iverson, twenty-six, school teacher.
    The King’s Ferry Killer is not the most prolific of serial killers. Bundy, and even Dahlmer, have him beat.
    But he